Evie Shockley is an American poet. Shockley received the 2012

Hurston/Wright Legacy Award The Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards program honors Black writers in the United States and around the globe for literary achievement. Introduced in 2001, the Legacy Award was the first national award presented to Black writers by a national organizatio ...

in Poetry for her book ''the new black'' and the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018.

Early life and education

Shockley is originally from

Nashville, Tennessee Nashville is the capital city of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the county seat, seat of Davidson County, Tennessee, Davidson County. With a population of 689,447 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 U.S. census, Nashville is the List of muni ...

. Shockley received a BA from

Northwestern University Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston, Illinois. Founded in 1851, Northwestern is the oldest chartered university in Illinois and is ranked among the most prestigious academic institutions in the world. Charte ...

, studied law at the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

from whence she received her JD, and received a PhD in English from

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

Career

Shockley teaches at

Rutgers University-New Brunswick Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's College, and was a ...

in New Jersey. Her work toured South Africa in 2007 as part of ''Biko 30/30'', an exhibit dedicated to activist

Steve Biko Bantu Stephen Biko (18 December 1946 – 12 September 1977) was a South African anti-apartheid activist. Ideologically an African nationalist and African socialist, he was at the forefront of a grassroots anti-apartheid campaign known ...

. She published the book ''Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry'' in 2011. The book explores the poetics of the

Black Arts Movement The Black Arts Movement (BAM) was an African American-led art movement that was active during the 1960s and 1970s. Through activism and art, BAM created new cultural institutions and conveyed a message of black pride. The movement expanded from ...

. ''the new black'', published in 2011 was lauded by poet Le Hinton and he also said Shockley was the "present and future of poetry." In this book her poetry draws connections within our culture, for instance a poem that cites statistics and black lives through poetry. In 2017 Shockley released her book of poetry, '' semiautomatic''. Her work includes a kind of

collage Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. ...

style that mixes more tradition forms with quizzes or labels and compares historical figures and contemporary cultural icons with scenes of civil rights movements and atrocities of the twenty first century. The title plays with the same kind of pun referring to the gun and also her take on a cycle of contemporary reactions to violence. She dedicated this book to

Alicia Garza Alicia Garza (born January 4, 1981) is an American civil rights activist and writer known for co-founding the international Black Lives Matter movement. She has organized around the issues of health, student services and rights, rights for dome ...

Patrisse Cullors Patrisse Marie Khan-Cullors Brignac (née Cullors-Brignac; born June 20, 1983) is an American activist, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, artist and writer. Cullors created the hashtag in 2013 and has written and spoken widely abo ...

, and

Opal Tometi Opal is a hydrated amorphous form of silica (SiO2·''n''H2O); its water content may range from 3 to 21% by weight, but is usually between 6 and 10%. Due to its amorphous property, it is classified as a mineraloid, unlike crystalline forms ...

who founded

Black Lives Matter Black Lives Matter (abbreviated BLM) is a decentralized political and social movement that seeks to highlight racism, discrimination, and racial inequality experienced by black people. Its primary concerns are incidents of police bruta ...

Awards

In 2012 she was awarded The Holmes National Poetry Prize. She was a

MacDowell Colony MacDowell is an artist's residency program in Peterborough, New Hampshire, United States, founded in 1907 by composer Edward MacDowell and his wife, pianist and philanthropist Marian MacDowell. Prior to July 2020, it was known as the MacDowell ...

Fellow in 2013. Shockley's book, ''the new black'', won the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. ''semiautomatic'' was a 2017 finalist for ''The Believer'' Poetry Award and the ''LA Times'' Book Prize.

Bibliography

* ''The Gorgon Goddess'' (Carolina Wren Press, 2001) * ''a half-red sea'' (Carolina Wren Press, 2006) * ''31 words * prose poems'' (Belladonna* Books, 2007) * ''the new black'' (Wesleyan University Press, 2011, 2012

in Poetry) * ''Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry'' (University Of Iowa Press, 2011) * ''semiautomatic'' (Wesleyan University Press, 2017)

References

External links

* Evie Shockley, Roderick A. Ferguson, Maria A. Windell, Daniel Worden
"Reconsidering Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric. A Symposium, Part I"
''Los Angeles Review of Books''. (6 January 2016) * Adam McGee, Ed Pavlić, Evie Shockley
"From the Editors: Allies"
''Boston Review''. (23 October 2019) 1965 births Living people 21st-century American poets University of Michigan Law School alumni Duke University alumni Northwestern University alumni Poets from Tennessee {{US-poet-1960s-stub